I recently purchased 2 Dell Optiplex GX270's from a friend for $45.00. They were office PC's, a little on the older side that his mortgage company was just getting rid of. The thing that I found out a short time later was that the machines wouldn't start up. Just before windows would start booting up, the machine's would suddenly shut off, followed by an error that read "Previous shutdown due to thermal event." upon starting them back up again.

I cleaned the machine's inside and out, until there was not a spec of dust. I ensured that all fans worked and airflow was moving properly. After doing some research and reading all kinds of similar reported problems, I came upon a few rare cases that had been caused by bad capacitors.

I went ahead and took off the heatsink so I could see the capacitors near the CPU, and sure enough, they were popped, and leaking. Soon after I decided to see if I could order the caps online, and not let the machines go to waste. I looked around, and found a perfect premium grade capacitor set for Dell Optiplex GX270's, that I ordered from badcaps.net, the order was smooth, the service was great, and I had the 19 capacitors that I needed in no time.

I went ahead and got to work.... I'll let the pictures do the rest of the explaining, enjoy!.
Machines $45
Caps: $25
Getting down and dirty: Priceless


Both machines run very nicely, I use them as a file server, print server, and for other task based needs. I also inserted a custom fan setup into each machine to improve the poor airflow/circulation in the thin PC cases of Dell Optiplex's. Hope you enjoyed, I sure did :)

I was watching the crunchies, which is an awards ceremony held by TechCrunch - http://crunchies.techcrunch.com/

During the awards this song was performed by Richter Scales about the web2.0 world today....this video is awesome.

In my last blog post, I presented a cooling system for my laptop that utilized many fans... Henry said: "Eric has a fan fetish". Just to prove Henry right, I will show off these new fans I got :) Aside from completely erasing one of my clients databases today with only a 6 month old backup, I still managed to have fun with these. Lots of fans always put a smile on my face.